In the Land of Cotton

I usually don’t get all off into
addressing white people on behalf of anyone other than myself, but since
black folks are talking about you only among ourselves it’s necessary
to tell you what we’ve been whispering about behind the slave cabins and
around the fire.

It’s mostly on Facebook, but it’s our version of a campfire and we are enslaved by it.

Oh.

And please forgive the familiarity of me
addressing you by first name. You have called us niggers a time or two,
so calling you — a white Southern woman of a certain age — by your first
name is my version of that mythical Emmett Till whistle, only you
cannot call your brother and co-defendent, Bubba, to come string me up.

But I digress.

During the first years of my elementary
school education in Hamilton, Ohio, I attended Jefferson Elementary
School, one among a network of public schools all named after American
presidents.

The irony did not dawn on me until much
later and, of course, my poor white and black Appalachian classmates and
I weren’t taught then that Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves but
carried on a “love” affair with his ace No. 1 love slave Sally Hemmings.

I was born in 1965, just before the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., down in your beloved South.

I am 48 years old, which makes you, at
66, just old enough to be my mother and, most importantly, old enough to
know better because, as the only black person you’ve publicly
befriended and not humiliated (more on that later) says all the time
when she is quoting her mentor Maya Angelou: When you know better, you do better.

Personally, I hate Oprah’s jingoistic
tendencies, but I bet y’all had a lot to talk about as one isolated
multi-millionaire to an isolated multi-billionaire.

Dang it!

I keep losing sight of my main point but you’ve gotta understand, this is all so delicious to me.

Kinda like your deep-fried macaroni and
cheese wrapped in bacon. I’ve never had it personally, but I know a lot
of morbidly obese, hypertensive and diabetic blacks in this country
have.

They swear by your food.

Your fattening, butter- and salt-soaked
food is why a lot of black folks are so confused by these racist
revelations.

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They’ve been seduced and blinded by how much you cook like
their aunts and grandmothers.

Your food reminds them of black family reunions, the best funerals and the most ghetto wedding receptions.

The Colored Section of heaven with an all-night buffet.

In your wistful memories of slavery and
black servitude you neglected to rhapsodize about the relationship black
slaves had with food, given the way y’all starved us and then left the
scraps of the hog for us to feed ourselves and our families.

That right there is a direct reason why we are disproportionately prone to heart disease, diabetes, hypertension.

Slavery left a lot of things within us; namely and literally, bad blood.

So, you see, you wanting to give your
brother the racist Southern wedding and reception of his dreams replete
with a ballet of distinguished-looking Uncle Bens in white coats and
gloves serving what was certainly an all-white platoon of guests (Oprah
does not count) is on its surface dehumanizing enough, but it also
belittles the devastating nuances folded within the terror of slavery.

I must say I really do appreciate, Paula, how much you run your mouth.

I love a verbose racist.

You’re my favorite kind.

Not only did you cop to calling blacks
niggers “a long time ago,” a video is now circulating of you during a
one-on-one interview with a New York Times staffer during a “Times Talks” event.

Remember that?

I thought you were going to come to tears
when you talked about your great, great grandfather who was so rattled
when he “lost all his workers” (Code: His slaves were freed by the
Emancipation Proclamation) that he shot himself in the head.

It gets darker.

You told the interviewer you indeed “have
black people in my life” and proceeded to cajole a black man named
Horace from the audience, but not before describing him as being
“blacker than this board” behind you.

The white woman interviewer, who I am
assuming was a good, liberal New Yorker, did not register shock or
horror or halt the interview. She instead joined you in calling him up.
When Horace was slow to show himself — we are sometimes a slow people —
you further encouraged him.

“C’mon, Horace! We can’t see you against that black background!”

Some in the audience chuckled audibly.

I don’t know why nobody stood up and demanded you apologize or at the least stormed out, causing a ruckus.

Audience apathy was as confusing as your own behavior.

Holding Horace’s hand, you talked about
how you believed the South to be less racist (than the north?) because
blacks were so “intregral” to your white lives. (It’s integral, by the
way.)

“They were like our family.”

Yeah, like family you beat, cheat, rape,
separate, relocate by force, sell like chattel, murder by brute force or
work to death over time.

I suspect you will get the full drift of
how wrong it’s been to hold that soft spot in your heart for slavery
once your endorsements dwindle and your TV appearances are relegated to
repeats, if that. The last thing you need to know about me and blacks of
my generation coming up all across America: We were made to sing
anthems of the slave-holding South as part of music class in schools
named for slave-holding presidents.

Oh I wish I were in the land of cotton/Old times there are not forgotten/Look away, look away, look away/Dixie land.